North American snowcover plummets to record low

PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 16, 2016: With the disclaimer that this is about to change as the first blizzard of the season sweeps from the Rockies through Ontario, as of Nov. 16, North American snow cover was at an all-time record low... by a lot. Here's a comparison by NOAA of the average versus today (keep in mind that the average has larger pixels than the actual, so it can appear to overestimate):

Another way to look at this is to subtract the normal snowcover from yesterday's. Blue areas have more snow than average, yellow and orange less. It's quite astounding really.

If you graph that out, it looks like this for North America:

Ice cover is faring even worse:

When you look globally, this year sticks out like a sore thumb:

A sudden jump like this doesn't point to climate change. If I didn't know better, I'd think it was a data anomaly. We'll see what happens as we move forward but this could make for an interesting winter -- the effects are unknown, as we've never recorded something like this before.